The company hopes the website refresh will boost both traffic and revenues.

Yahoo will also open its home page to rivals, allowing users to integrate third-party web services like Facebook or Hotmail into its portal.

Yahoo has been struggling to turn its position as the world’s most popular website into profits. The portal is the first move of new boss Carol Bartz.

Rich Riley says, “Yahoo can remain at the centre of the web experience”

Partnerships:

The new portal, however, also has an unprecedented number of links to non-Yahoo websites, potentially taking traffic away from Yahoo’s sprawling network of news, weather, finance, email, messaging, and picture services and more.

In the UK, for example, the Yahoo website features top headlines from the Telegraph, Guardian and Daily Mail newspapers.

Since the beta version of the Yahoo website was launched in the UK, Yahoo has become the second-largest source of online traffic to the Telegraph’s website, said Mr Riley.

Yahoo is getting a share of the advertising revenue generated by this traffic to partners. Read more…